So, What Would You Like To See?

I am thinking a lot about our Pathway to Discipleship and other elements of our ministry at University UMC especially as we get closer to The Large Church Initiative 2010. I thought I would pause to take some reader input about what I should be writing about. Want to know more about the details of the pathway? Want to know how our tracking system works? Want to know about the Pathway to Membership? Want some data regarding our successes and struggles with the pathway? Want to know what we see as our biggest challenges? Post your questions and ideas for posts in the comments or let me know via email or twitter (@pastorwill).

Memorizing Scripture

The other night at our Charge Conference (that is the connectional decision making body for the local church in United Methodist governance) the chair of our Administrative Board began the opening devotional by reciting Psalm 100 from memory. I was taken at how powerful that simple action was. Had you asked me beforehand if there would be much of a difference between him reading it or reciting it from memory I would have responded that I didn’t think it would matter, but it did. That brief experience really convicted me about what we are about to do as we move into the second component of our series of series “Season with the Savior.”

During “That’s What the Man Said: Key Teachings of Jesus” February 7-March 14, 2010, we will offer one key verse each week and challenge members of the congregation to memorize it. It will be my job to offer some resources and tools and give some encouragement to people who are committing to this discipline.

I have to admit that this is new to me. Remember, I didn’t grow up in the church so I never did “Sword Drills” or any other memory work in Sunday school. But as I have been thinking about how we are going to do this, I have become more and more convinced about how vital and important it is.

I believe that scripture tells us that God wants scripture to be more than something on our shelves; God wants it to be in our hearts. Deuteronomy 6:6 reads,

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

God wants the word to dwell in us, to be part of our very being. Colossians 3:16 reads,

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

If you have ever taken a Bible class with me, you might know that, for me, this is not as simple as memorizing key passages. I want people to know the overarching story of the Bible and the message that is heard from knowing the entire narrative of God’s relationship with God’s people. Just memorizing scripture doesn’t do this. However, when you combine the memorization of scripture with a life of comprehensive Bible study, these memorized passages become mental bookmarks. One verse calls to mind more than that verse. It calls to mind where it fits in the overarching story of redemption. It becomes a bookmark to remember all of God’s word to us.

I challenge you to try it. Our first verse will come Sunday, February 7th. We will cover it in worship and then have the whole week to memorize and live with it. I look forward to hearing how it goes and how this time with scripture affects individuals and the congregation as a whole.

Don’t know where to start? Check back on the weblog, I will be posting some tricks, tips and resources in the coming days.

peace,

will

Whew!

A lot of people assume that, because I am a pastor, the busiest times of my year revolve around Christmas and Easter. However, I am a specialized associate pastor so my life works just a little bit different. In the history of my ministry, January has consistently been the busiest month by far. There are two reasons for that.

One, because I have always worked in the area of Christian Education and Spiritual formation, January begins a new 'semester.' We launch a lot of new classes and studies in January. We also do that in the fall but summer gives a lot more time to prepare. Because the church and society are so busy from late November through the end of December, January courses involve a lot more last minute participation. There is also something about the beginning of a new year that causes a lot more people to show interest in learning and growing.

Two, because the end of the year is so busy, January seems to be a great time to catch up. And everybody seems to have the same idea. Thus, January becomes the busiest month of the year. So far this year, I have spent two nights in Dallas (my niece's wedding, that one was fun!) a night in Kerrville (for covenant connection), four days in Leakey (Annual Conference mid-winter youth camp - I had an amazing time.) The sporadic days I spent in town were pretty crammed full of kickoff sort of meeting and meetings to finish up 2009. (In fact I have one more of those tonight as we have our second Charge Conference to finalize University's budget.)

Needless to say, my attention to the blog, twitter and facebook have been seriously cut, especially because those days in Leakey were completely cut off from the world except for one of those phones that are actually attached to the wall.

I am looking forward to getting back in the office, back to my books and back to the blog. In the mean time, our Directing Pastor Charles Anderson has gone kicking and screaming into the current era with his blog debut and he is posting more faithfully than me. Check him out at:

http://blogs.uchurch.tv/charles/

peace,

will

So, Here's What Happened...

I am trying to remember exactly how I find myself in 2 Chronicles, Lamentations, Acts and Revelation. At the beginning of 2009, I made a commitment to to be more devoted to my daily Bible reading and prayer life. Somewhere in January, I decided that a fresh journey through the entire Bible was in order. That went fine for a couple of months, but then I got sidetracked. It wasn't that I stopped reading the Bible everyday, I just diverted from the systematic journey through the Bible I had planned. That was fine for a while. Then, at some point in the fall (I can't remember exactly when) it became clear that I was going to need to get back to reading all the way through. And I was pretty clear that it needed to get it done by the end of the year, which was a little scary because I had not gotten very far by then. I got back on the system that I had devised at the beginning of the year. I find the Bible a little overwhelming just going front to back, so I split it up and read some from multiple sections every day (for instance: Torah, Psalms, Prophets, Gospels, Letters.) Doing this in nearly every free moment throughout the fall, I almost made it. I was on track to get it all done by December 31st... and then... we got two new foster kids. If you are a parent, you will fully understand how that sort of thing can get in the way of well-laid plans.

So, I slowed down but I didn't stop and I have not given up. If you look on the right side of the blog, you will see where I am. Here are the books of the Bible I need to cover to finish this journey:

2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (fortunately the minor prophets are pretty short), plus the rest of Lamentations, Acts and Revelation.

A few thoughts: First, this is certainly not my first time to read the Bible but I think this will end up being the fastest. (I did actually start in January but 95% of the reading has happened in just a few months.) Second, it never ceases to amaze my the new things I find every time. And I am just not talking about how I see things in new ways. There are whole narratives that I simply forget about and that seem brand new. It is absolutely amazing.

Theologian J.I. Packer once wrote "Every Christian worth his salt reads the Bible cover-to-cover every year." I know that for many that sounds impossible to do every year but I know that there are lots of Christians who have never read the Bible cover-to-cover ever. I know that there are lots of Christians who have never read more than small sections of the Bible. (I mean, raise your hand if you know what is in Nahum.)

Anyway, pray for me as I get through the rest of the books this time through. And keep your eyes on the blog and on the u|news, we will be focusing on Bible reading this year at University.

peace,

will

Season with the Savior

2010 is a big year for University United Methodist Church. All churches are in the business of making disciples of Jesus Christ and University has been working over the last couple of years to be singularly focused on that mission. We have developed and implemented our Pathway to Discipleship and engaged an impressive percentage of our new members in a systematic journey towards discipleship development. 2010 brings us to the next step in our journey. This past Sunday, we kicked off Season with the Savior, a six-month all church emphasis designed to engage the entire church is looking to Jesus in order to look more like Jesus. It is designed around the three-fold Pathway to Discipleship: looking at how we have a Jesus meeting, learn the Jesus message, and begin to hear our mission from Jesus. The series extends beyond the sermons. Our journey together involves our Sunday school classes and other small-group Bible studies and is coordinated with our Pathway to Discipleship offerings.

I am excited about the series and also excited about the timing. We will be right in the middle of this series as we host The Large Church Initiative 2010 which is focused on "Disciple-Making and Decision-Making in the Large Church." We will be sharing a lot about our pathway for making disciples and it will be great that the entire church will be focused on meeting, message and mission.

You can read more about Season with the Savior at The U's website:

Season with the Savior - unews live!

You can listen to or watch the first sermons of the series here:

umedia

Learn more about Large Church Initiative 2010 here:

LCI 2010 San Antonio

peace,

will

Primal

A quick review of Primal, A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity by Mark Batterson. Okay, full disclosure: I was expecting to put this book down after a couple of pages. The publisher sent it to me so I felt obliged to give it a try. I wasn't judging the book by its cover but rather by its title (actually its subtitle). I read "Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity" and I thought, great, another book on how to be "real" Christians, we just need to go back to the early days and live like they did in the opening pages of Acts (without the falling down dead for incorrectly reporting your income to giving ratio.) Had I paid a little more attention to the author, I would have realized how wrong I was. Batterson is the lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington D.C. a cutting edge ministry in our nation's capital. I should have realized that he would offer us something a little more forward thinking and that he did.

The author bases his quest for the soul of Christianity on what Jesus proclaims to be the greatest commandment, that we love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength and then dedicates the four sections of the book to considering what that would actually look like. This is not another manifesto on "what the church needs to do" but a clear challenge on what we are really supposed to do to live out our faith as followers of Jesus.

Mark Batterson is profoundly intelligent and very well read so his insight is reflected in great examples, analogies and stories from science, history, psychology, sociology, etc.

More full disclosure: I could not put this book down. It was compelling and convicting. For our University folks, this is a great recommendation for the mission phase of our Pathway to Discipleship. That is the phase where we listen for our call from Jesus and consider what we are supposed to do about it. This whole book is about what we are to do when we really decide to listen to Jesus' call on our lives.

peace,

will

December Encourager

This article appeared in the December edition of UUMC's Encourager. Since if includes some important statistics on The Pathway to Discipleship, I thought I would post it here:

The end of the year is a strange and wondrous time for me as a pastor, husband, father and follower of Jesus Christ. I tend to feel a bit overwhelmed by the confluence of activities and emotions. There are all the things that go with the celebrations of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and The New Year: decorations, travel, family, presents, parties, etc. Then there are the things that go with the end of the year itself: budgets, paperwork, charge conferences, and reports. Add to that the oddity that the sun is a little less present than usual bringing on workdays that begin before sunrise and end after sunset. This all tends to lead to me being a bit more reflective than usual. Fortunately, the end of the year is a good time to be reflective.

As we come to the end of the year, I have been reflecting on what brought me to University United Methodist Church, the idea of creating a system to help bring people into a deep and abiding relationship with Jesus Christ, a Pathway to Discipleship. At this time last year, we had just rolled-out the pathway, and were beginning to see the first fruits of offering people an intentional way to experience a Jesus Meeting, hear the Jesus Message and discover their Jesus Mission. We were encouraged by the first tentative steps of this new way of looking at the ministry of discipleship. Now, as I look back at 2009, we have even more to be encouraged about.

In my column in December of 2008, I shared that we had 50 people engage in the first phase of the pathway, the meeting phase in which we ask the question, “What is my need for Jesus and what do I do about it?” We were thrilled by that initial response. We are even more thrilled that in 2009 over 180 people have participated in meeting phase offerings: Jesus 101, Alpha and Jesus for Seekers and Skeptics.

The idea of the pathway is for people to continue moving forward from the meeting phase onto the message phase in which we ask the question, “What is the news about Jesus and what do I do about it?” Back in December of 2008, I had no idea what the response would be to the invitation to hear the message of Jesus. Since the inception of the pathway, over 200 people have responded to our invitation go deeper, participating in message phase courses like New Testament Survey: The Message of Jesus, and Disciple Bible Study.

We are even beginning to watch people move into the mission phase in which we ask the question, “What is my call from Jesus and what do I do about it?” People have been listening and discerning in Coach’s Directed Study, on The Walk to Emmaus and in our inaugural class of The Pastor’s Academy.

So, as I look back, I am always looking forward. The idea of the Pathway to Discipleship is really striking a chord with our new members. People are hungry for a deep and meaningful relationship with God and are searching for clear guidance about how to begin a journey. I am excited for them and I am also hopeful for those who have been around for a while. The pathway is not just for new members. It has so much to offer anyone who seeks a deeper walk with God. Maybe it is a chance to review what you believe, to fill in any gaps in your knowledge or understanding of our faith and tradition. Perhaps it an opportunity to become more intentional about your commitment to spiritual growth. It could be that you desire to better articulate your faith to those around you and need a little review to become more comfortable with speaking your faith. Or maybe you just want to share the excitement of sitting at a table with someone who is hearing about Jesus for the first time or cracking open the Bible for the first time. Maybe you want to be there at the holy moment when someone finally discovers that that God has a call and claim on their life.

Learn more about the Pathway to Discipleship at our next u|connect, Sunday evening, January 24. Register by calling Michael Andres or email michael@uchurch.tv. Or, jump right into the meeting phase and sign up for Alpha: Pop Culture, Monday nights beginning February 1^st. Register by calling the discipleship office or email laura.mick@uchurch.tv

Blessings on a joyous and holy celebration of the birth of our savior!

will